A dictator's daughter runs for president, unleashing memories of Guatemala's dark past

NEBAJ, Guatemala — Gabriel de Paz still dreams that he's running from the dictator's soldiers.

When the military invaded his Guatemalan mountain town in the early 1980s, De Paz and his Maya family abandoned their animals and their straw-roofed home and fled into the woods. They hid as Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt's security forces burned villages and massacred Indigenous civilians they suspected of collaborating with leftist guerrillas.

To De Paz, the general is why his family spent years in hiding, why his grandmother starved to death, why he still has nightmares.

The farmer imagined that his people's memories of the mass killings under Ríos Montt remained vivid, passed through generations.

Then the dictator's daughter came to the mountainous Ixil region this spring to launch her presidential campaign.

De Paz was dumbfounded. Zury Ríos received a warm welcome from hundreds wearing the traditional embroidered blouses and straw hats of the Maya Ixil.

Here was the strongman's daughter standing next to an Ixil interpreter and speaking about how villagers needed agricultural fertilizers and schools with running water. People were cheering.

"There are a lot of youth but there are also grandparents who remember the hard times we lived, and that's why forgiving is so necessary, that's why reconciliation is so necessary," she told the crowd.

That was as close as she came to talking about what courts have deemed a genocide but that in interviews she denies ever took place.

De Paz, 62, doesn't see an attempt at reconciliation, only an effort to expunge a traumatic history.

"They want to erase, they want to cancel," he said, sitting at his kitchen table in Nebaj, a municipality in the Ixil highlands. "That's our worry if she governs."

Guatemala has long fought over how its darkest chapter should be remembered, with Indigenous and human rights groups accusing right-wing forces of using their political power to bury the past.

The government has stopped providing survivors